


Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

by heartswells



Series: Eruri Week 2016 [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Eruri Week, Eruri Week 2016, Eruri Week Day Two: Pining, M/M, Pining, Self-Destruction, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Warning: Mentions of Blood & Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 22:29:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6027736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartswells/pseuds/heartswells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He treated Levi as if he was already a man that was worthy of respect and not as if he was a man who had already cast away his worthiness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

He brushed his teeth until the bristles clawed open his gums, and he was forced to swallow his own blood. He tore at the knots in his hair with such viciousness that the wooden teeth of the comb snapped and his inky strands coated the floor. He flayed his skin beneath water that hissed cruelly with steam, and he scrubbed at his flesh with such vehemence that his skin turned cracked and dry. He groomed until his body reacted with pain and revulsion, but the history beneath his skin could not be stripped away.

 

Sometime ago, as he listened to women cry beneath the fists of men, he had become tainted. Sometime ago, when he had learned what it meant to blind a man who was already deaf in the name of self-justice, he had degraded himself. Sometime ago, when he had sacrificed his morality for survival, he had exchanged his blood for grease. Sometime ago, with an atrophying body, he learned what it meant to be another machine in the underground.

 

Pain blinds more than the eyes: it blinds the heart as well. When his veins had screamed with starvation and malice, with bruises and burns, and with indignance and desperation, he had confused the darkness for light. Now, as he stumbled out of the inferno hidden beneath the ground, light invaded his eyes . The light burned, for he could see clearly all that he had done.

 

Maybe he felt inhuman; maybe he felt too human. Inside him, loathing roiled and roared; it was voiceless, but it was powerful, like the hand of God. He wished to unstitch his body and watch as his nerves writhed beneath chlorine; he wished to inject bleach in his veins and feel it sear his body as it poisoned him. He needed to crack open his ribcage and tear his corrupted heart from the body it had failed.

 

Retribution had sought him through Erwin, but retribution does not erase the destruction one has already sown. He could bleed every drop of life from his body in the name of victory, but he could never breathe life back into those who he had defeated. Maybe he could have lived with this guilt and fooled himself with self-righteousness if someone had not demanded better of him. But God acted through Erwin Smith, and Erwin treated him as though he, Levi, were a man and not a product of the ghetto’s machine. He treated Levi as if he was already a man that was worthy of respect and not as if he was a man who had already cast away his worthiness. 

 

Levi fell for him, for Erwin Smith, but it was love that writhed inside him like a terminal illness. It felt cancerous, like an ever growing tumor destined to kill. A vehement, fearful anger consumed him when Erwin stood beside him. He wanted to lash out and incinerate him.  He wanted to slash at Erwin’s body until he became unrecognizable and transform him into something grotesque —anything to eradicate his terror.  Levi wanted to purge the earth of the suggestion that he was a man at all.

 

For Levi believed he loved like gangrene; he feared he’d crawl into Erwin’s wounds and rot his living body. Never, had he respected someone as he respected Erwin Smith, and so, he believed, he must never be near him. Over and over, he whispered that a dirtiness followed those like himself, an infectious dirtiness that ruined all it kissed. 

 

He could not clean away his sins, so instead he brushed his teeth until he bled.

 


End file.
